SimCity: Regions

[Sunfighter 186]

I'm just wondering where agriculture comes into the game. In all the screenshots I've seen there are these skyscraper strewn CBDs surrounded by savannah lands, and if this game is based on resource availability and distribution (i.e why else use GlassBox) then surely food is a important resource... Indeed it is this which was my main negative reaction to the limits on areas available to build on.

 

Food isnt a resource in this game. So im guessing it will be up to the regional people to decide if they will allow a person to build small or not. I assume most would, but the more leaderboard obsessed will probably want every town to be big and only big.

[nhgriffith 179]

First, I imagine the ability to zone farms and have a food resource is probably a city specialty probably coming in and expansion pack.

Second, there will be leader board categories for things that are better accomplished in smaller cities, like education, crime, pollution, etc.

Also, on those region maps, I'm pretty sure yellow represents highways and white represents rail. On the 16 city regions, there are four 4-city clusters connected by road, and then the are cross-cluster connections via rail.

[Spatzimaus 77]

First, I imagine the ability to zone farms and have a food resource is probably a city specialty probably coming in and expansion pack.

 

I seriously doubt it.  Adding a new required resource would completely unbalance the economics of every existing city, since they'd now have to either pay a bunch more money (to acquire the needed resource) or waste a tile on farmland.  And if it's in an expansion (meaning it has to be OPTIONAL), how does that work?  So it'd have to either be added in a free patch, or its effect would have to be something you could do without.  (Or both.)  If it's just a simple income booster, then we've already got plenty of industries for that, and if it's a growth booster, we've already got parks.  Either way, not really worthy of the level of effort they'd probably need to implement it; I'd much rather they spent their effort on things that measurably improve our experience (larger tiles, terraforming or region editing, and so on).

 

Besides, we're making 2x2km tiles, basically the boroughs/districts/neighborhoods of a larger city, with each cluster of tiles in a region effectively forming a single city.  How many farms do you see within a couple kilometers of the core of any major city?  Even if you live in somewhere like Omaha or Kansas City, cities in the heart of farm country, the standard suburban sprawl extends MUCH further than that (although you'll have a few slaughterhouses in the city proper, because that's where the rail stations are).  So it's not realistic to have farms that close, but more importantly, consider the scale.  To produce enough food to feed a city of a million people, you need FAR more arable land than a few 2x2km tiles; we've got a couple dozen states' worth of farmland producing food for 300 million people.  There's no way any farm we build in this game could produce enough food to make even a tiny difference for the cities we build, and that means the GlassBox agent system just doesn't do a whole lot of good (since the agents from a single farm wouldn't carry much food, even if you ignore the fact that most crops can only be harvested once or twice a year).

[JK Storm 4]

It's amazing how many haters there are out there. Here are some facts, if they haven't already been posted...

• The creators of SimCity (2013) use to play the old SimCity games and also programmed/developed the recent ones. Keep that in mind. They are lovers of the series and have worked hard to develop something everyone will enjoy. I don't think they would do anything else but make the best SimCity ever.
• This is a reboot. They decided to make something from the ground up again. In doing so, they decided to focus on the simulation engine (which they did in their spare time first, then introduced it to EA and said "this would be great for simulating cities... whaddya say?" <--- this is a fact to, btw. look up some of the video interviews/spotlights
• Ocean said, explicitly, that it would be much easier to focus on the simulation in the beginning and master it first, and then increase city size as PC power/memory grows... he's implying that city size is something everyone at Maxis would like to see increased... I think we can expect this in a future upgrade/patch.
• They also said (explicitly, again) that the reason for not having the cities right next to each other was due to the limitations of current PCs (probably the mean, not us extremists with 16 GB of RAM and OC'd everything).
• I played the beta (as I'm sure many of you have), and although I was taken aback from how small the plot size was initially, I quickly got over it and fell in love with how rich the simulation engine was. In fact, city size doesn't mean much to me anymore like I thought it did.
• Since the beta, my itch to play SimCity became overwhelming, so I reinstalled SC4 and Rush Hour. After playing SC4 for about an hour or so, I quickly realized how dead this world was compared to the new SC. It was flat out boring in comparison. Statistical simulation is nothing compared to GlassBox... it's just amazing.
• FYI... the game wasn't solely built for multiplayer. Building a simulation engine the way previous Maxis employees always dreamed of was the #1 motivational factor. <---- another fact, explicitly stated by Ocean.
• Finally, if you want large sprawling cities using a subpar simulation engine, there's always Cities XL and SC4. PCs just aren't powerful enough to handle the simulation engine AND huge huge cities. You can't have both... not yet.
  • If you always wanted to keep track of the details in your city and how your decisions can influence each individual sim, then March 5 your wish comes true.

[nhgriffith 179]

I seriously doubt it.  Adding a new required resource would completely unbalance the economics of every existing city, since they'd now have to either pay a bunch more money (to acquire the needed resource) or waste a tile on farmland.  And if it's in an expansion (meaning it has to be OPTIONAL), how does that work?  So it'd have to either be added in a free patch, or its effect would have to be something you could do without.  (Or both.)  If it's just a simple income booster, then we've already got plenty of industries for that, and if it's a growth booster, we've already got parks.  Either way, not really worthy of the level of effort they'd probably need to implement it; I'd much rather they spent their effort on things that measurably improve our experience (larger tiles, terraforming or region editing, and so on).

Regions would simply have sort of a tickbox for which expansions are in use, and you could only play in the region if you had all of the expansions the region was using (and the region creator would pick these when he created the region). If you're not playing in a region using the farming expansion, there's no change. 

Besides, we're making 2x2km tiles, basically the boroughs/districts/neighborhoods of a larger city, with each cluster of tiles in a region effectively forming a single city.  How many farms do you see within a couple kilometers of the core of any major city?  Even if you live in somewhere like Omaha or Kansas City, cities in the heart of farm country, the standard suburban sprawl extends MUCH further than that (although you'll have a few slaughterhouses in the city proper, because that's where the rail stations are).  So it's not realistic to have farms that close, but more importantly, consider the scale.  To produce enough food to feed a city of a million people, you need FAR more arable land than a few 2x2km tiles; we've got a couple dozen states' worth of farmland producing food for 300 million people.  There's no way any farm we build in this game could produce enough food to make even a tiny difference for the cities we build, and that means the GlassBox agent system just doesn't do a whole lot of good (since the agents from a single farm wouldn't carry much food, even if you ignore the fact that most crops can only be harvested once or twice a year).

As for all this, first off, if that's the way you want to look at your region, that's up to you. But I view them as individual cities even if the tiles are smaller than the largest from SC4. There'd be nothing wrong with making one of them a farming town, just as plenty of people do in SC4.

Have you ever been to Omaha or Kansas City? I used to live right outside of Lincoln, and I travel through Kansas City fairly regularly. And while there are not farms right in the city proper, the farm land happens pretty quickly.

As for the rate of food production, first off, a city of 1 million is going to be extremely difficult to attain... not everyone will have a city of this size. Second, food can be imported--it doesn't have to be grown in your region. Third... the number of citizens in a residential building or jobs in a commercial or industrial building are not necessarily realistic numbers for the number of people that would really live/work in a building of that size, so why does the amount of food a farm produce have to be realistic? There'd be no problem with Maxis tuning this number to a number that, while unrealistic, made for interesting gameplay.

As for what Maxis should be working on? Farming is something that I enjoyed from SC4. I enjoyed making farming villages occasionally, and it's one of the few things that disappoints me about the new game. Farming may not "measurably improve your experience," but it would measurably improve mine. And I'm not going to say what improves my experience should be more valuable than what would improve your experience (unless you're not purchasing the game), but I will point out that your personal experience isn't the only one Maxis is concerned about. Nor is mine, to be sure. But just because you wouldn't find farming enjoyable and just because they may not do any of the things you think would be an improvement doesn't mean their ignoring their customers... it just means there are more customers than just you.

[Sunfighter 186]

How do you know having a city of 1 million is difficult to achieve?

[Towel 76]

How do you know having a city of 1 million is difficult to achieve?

 

You're going to need a great deal of your city to be zoned residential, all high density, with enough services, employment, and shopping to keep them all happy... That is going to be hard to achieve, and probably ONLY with the support of other cities.

[Spatzimaus 77]

Have you ever been to Omaha or Kansas City? I used to live right outside of Lincoln, and I travel through Kansas City fairly regularly. And while there are not farms right in the city proper, the farm land happens pretty quickly.

As for the rate of food production, first off, a city of 1 million is going to be extremely difficult to attain... not everyone will have a city of this size.

 

First of all, I grew up in Omaha, and my grandfather owned a farm (albeit in Iowa).  The farms do NOT happen "pretty quickly" for Omaha; you have to go a good dozen miles from downtown to reach the nearest farms in Nebraska, and SimCity is built around 2x2km tiles.  Heck, 72nd street, the city's biggest north-south road, is six miles (10 km) from the river.

 

Second, do you even know how much land is needed for food production?  A square kilometer of perfectly managed farmland produces enough food for about 2000 people.  That means that if three out of every four 2x2 tiles in your region map were entirely filled with farms, and had no residents whatsoever, the fourth tile could have no more than 24,000 residents before you'd starve.  75% of your land as farms, and you STILL can't make anything larger than a small town.  (And that's assuming the terrain is perfectly flat, the soil quality is ideal, you don't waste acreage on non-food livestock like horses, and there are no farm subsidies to prevent another Dust Bowl or keep food prices from bankrupting farmers.)

Given that the betas had us with tile populations of 15-20k using mostly low-density construction, that'd be ridiculously limiting.  You say that we CAN import food, but as this math shows, it's more like we MUST import food no matter how much agriculture we want to place.  If we're required to import most (if not all) of our food, to where the tiny bit we include on our city tiles has no real impact, then what's the point?  It'd just bog down the agent system with data packets serving no real purpose, since unlike in SC4 it can't just be abstracted.

Plus, how does a market work when there wouldn't be anyone with a food surplus to buy from?  They'd have to raise crop yields to ridiculously unrealistic values to allow anyone to raise enough food to sell for money.  And as I asked before, how do you balance this when some players (those who didn't buy the expansion) wouldn't have to pay to import food, and wouldn't be potential customers for people selling food, while those who did buy it would have to pay this extra amount?

 

Third, 1 million people in SimCity is not difficult.  I could say this is because people have already made million-resident tiles, but really it's because we're not actually making 16 distinct cities in a region.  We're making something more like New York (five boroughs separated by water but connected by bridges, highways, and trains and who share an international airport) or Los Angeles (basically the same, minus the water part).  Even if you don't want to think of all 16 as being a single city, the tiles are clearly grouped in sets of four (with a Great Work for each set), so a million total residents across 4-16 tiles is not going to be difficult at all.  And sure, we're not making anything as large as NYC or LA, but can you name any city of over 100,000 people that doesn't have a university AND a power plant AND cultural buildings AND a commercial district?  Since you can't fit all of those into a single 2x2 tile (at least, not if you want to fit anything else there, like people), the tiles in your region have to be much more interdependent than real-world cities are.  Ergo, they're not distinct cities, they're simply neighborhoods in a single large city.  (And if they simply filled in the empty areas between with standard suburban sprawl, it'd look just like Los Angeles...)

[nhgriffith 179]

Whatever. You're free to think of it however you want. I think it would be fun to have farms, and I hope they add them later, but I'm okay if they don't. I'm sorry you're not okay with me thinking farm towns were fun to do occasionally in sc4.

[dysonraf 37]

I love the idea of a small quaint town in this game. Complete under utilizing of a tile but great fun to watch

[PGHammer 5]

 

Yes, I've taken to calling it "SimVillage". Honestly, since most large towns are bigger in area and population than what one can build in SimVillage.

Older towns, yes.

However, the trend in new development (established towns as well) is toward regionalization and zoning (similar to theming in SC 2013) - for the simple reason that real-world communities are not bubble communities; they exist as part of a wider region/county/state. A region will have a *flavor* different from another region (even in what may be the same county or, in the case of larger cities, the same city - Washington, DC or even New York City are prime examples - in the case of New York City, look at the differences between Brooklyn and the Bronx, or between either and Queens) - the *village/borough* concept is actually drawn from the real world.

I'm actually expecting there to be more data available in SC 2013 than in SC4 (which is not exactly easy to manage on a whole-large-city level) - for that reason we as Mayors may actually be glad of the smaller village concept.

If you get the chance, talk to a mayor of a small town - find out exactly what he has on his plate on a daily basis. (If you know of a town or city that also has a city manager, that's another person whose ear you should bend - a manager and mayor have overlapping responsibilities, and are required to work together to keep the town or city running smoothly; it's something that SimCity has implemented in the Advisory Council, which dates back to the original Sim City). Do you REALLY want to drown in Information Overload? (There are times that SC4 threatens to do just that - that is why there is a limit to how large I would let a city there grow.)

 

I love the way you use EA marketing tools in your comment.

What SC4 info overload? I find SC4 too simple and was looking for a challenge in SC2013 but what I get is something called "Simvillage 2013",

Why can't they give us a choice tough? Even if I wanted it to be as "modern" planning wise as you want it to be, why can't I make it the old ways? Why does it need to be predefined anyway?

 

I didn't lift the terms from EA, but from politics - specifically, urban/regional-development politics and the Battle Over Sprawl (referred to here in Maryland as "smart growth" or, by its opponents "anti-growth").

 

It's also why I suggested picking the brains of real small-town mayors.

 

You're right on SC4 being simple *by comparison* compared to the current SimCity - which was exactly my point.  Even with the smaller amount of problems to manage, the issue with larger cities in any SimCity (even 2000 Unlimited, my original exposure to the franchise) is *scale*.  Trying to start off with a large city (even one of the included model cities) is the political equivalent of diving of the high-board without knowing how much water is under you - due to being blindfolded.  Learn to crawl before you walk, and walk before you run.  Overconfidence is a synonym for hubris, which invariably leads to disaster - in anything.  Because the current SimCity throws more details at you, starting small makes more (not less) sense than ever.

 

Here are three towns that I suggest throwing into Google (or other search engine of choice): Forest Heights, Morningside, and Maryland City.  These are all real small towns about the size of the starting size of SimCity; however, each has had their share of mis-steps that you would think wouldn't happen in a small town.  (My plan with the size of SimCity's cities is to use the sandbox feature for region-modelling analysis, especially if, at some point, I can plug data from real towns and cities into it for realism.)  If I can get comfortable dealing with an entire region, I CAN always go back to SC4 - which I have installed - for big-city tackling. 

[PGHammer 5]

 

 

Yes, I've taken to calling it "SimVillage". Honestly, since most large towns are bigger in area and population than what one can build in SimVillage.

Older towns, yes.

However, the trend in new development (established towns as well) is toward regionalization and zoning (similar to theming in SC 2013) - for the simple reason that real-world communities are not bubble communities; they exist as part of a wider region/county/state. A region will have a *flavor* different from another region (even in what may be the same county or, in the case of larger cities, the same city - Washington, DC or even New York City are prime examples - in the case of New York City, look at the differences between Brooklyn and the Bronx, or between either and Queens) - the *village/borough* concept is actually drawn from the real world.

I'm actually expecting there to be more data available in SC 2013 than in SC4 (which is not exactly easy to manage on a whole-large-city level) - for that reason we as Mayors may actually be glad of the smaller village concept.

If you get the chance, talk to a mayor of a small town - find out exactly what he has on his plate on a daily basis. (If you know of a town or city that also has a city manager, that's another person whose ear you should bend - a manager and mayor have overlapping responsibilities, and are required to work together to keep the town or city running smoothly; it's something that SimCity has implemented in the Advisory Council, which dates back to the original Sim City). Do you REALLY want to drown in Information Overload? (There are times that SC4 threatens to do just that - that is why there is a limit to how large I would let a city there grow.)

 

I love the way you use EA marketing tools in your comment.

What SC4 info overload? I find SC4 too simple and was looking for a challenge in SC2013 but what I get is something called "Simvillage 2013",

Why can't they give us a choice tough? Even if I wanted it to be as "modern" planning wise as you want it to be, why can't I make it the old ways? Why does it need to be predefined anyway?

 

Heavy on the marketing indeed Besides, very US centric in terms of approach. In Europe neither urban nor regional development can be compared there, it is based on completely different principles and methods.

It's almost funny.

I was looking at Simcity (the current one) compared to real-world urban development/redevelopment at the town/small-city level because it's a hot topic locally/regionally (I live in the Washington, DC suburbs - so I am looking it it compared to suburban development and re-development, therefore the "Americanisms") - I can't compare it to Europe because I've never been to Europe, and I don't watch enough of the English-language versions of channels such as FRANCE24 or BBC World to get an idea of how European urban development or even UK urban development gets handled. The only other city sim that comes close is CitiesXL Platinum - however, that doesn't have as many datapoints as even SC4.

 

In short, local politics, not marketing.

[macvirt 361]

The prime difference, in rough terms, is that American urban development is much more a case of planned development as opposed to European development which is more a case of "evolved / historically grown" development. Ofcourse, differences and different conditions all around, various stages of growth or decline as well, but ultimately American urban development is simply incredibly young compared to European urban development.

 

One result is for example that farming areas on the Eu mainland are not as clearly seperated from urban areas as is more common in the US, often agricultural areas are mixed in with residential and commercial areas in cities of all sizes. A very funny thing in that regard which I came across when I first moved to Europe was seeing commercial areas where highrise buildings have farming floors and rooftops, data centers tied with growhouses, very wierd to see at first. 

 

If you look at infrastructural development of urban areas in Europe, it is pretty damn hard to find a city or even a town with a grid structure for roads, predominantly because it has grown to be over far longer than our Republic has existed. 

 

The interesting bit is that for US formats of urban development it far more often comes down to following a specific format as opposed to hybridising as is visible in Europe. When that is taken to a simulation game, hard choices have to be made, and the source of the game is a strong point of influence in these matters. The limitations that result from such choices are instruments in service of marketing. Which is only natural.